For two centuries the Vijayanagara Empire — “the City of Victory” — dominated southern India from a capital on the Tungabhadra river whose scale stunned every foreign visitor. The Persian ambassador Abdur Razzaq (1440s) wrote that eye had never seen its like; the Portuguese trader Domingo Paes (c. 1520) judged it as large as Rome and “the best provided city in the world,” its markets heaped with rubies and roses. Modern estimates make greater Vijayanagara one of the largest cities on Earth in its era — plausibly around half a million people — watered by anicuts and aqueducts threaded through a granite boulder landscape.
Its politics rested on managing the five Muslim Deccan sultanates to the north — Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golconda, Bidar, Berar — which the empire’s octogenarian strongman, Rama Raya (regent and de facto ruler), played against one another for decades with brilliant, abrasive success. The abrasion told: in 1564 the perpetually feuding sultanates did the one thing Vijayanagara’s security assumed they never would. They allied.
23 January 1565
The armies met south of the Krishna river — the battle is named for the town of Talikota, though fought nearer the villages of Rakkasagi and Tangadagi. The forces were enormous by any accounting, and the fighting opened well for Vijayanagara — until it broke on two hinges: the sultanates’ superior massed artillery (served by expert gunners, firing, by tradition, bags of copper coin at close range), and the battlefield defection of two Muslim commanders in Vijayanagara service, long resentful and — by several accounts — pre-arranged. The aged Rama Raya, directing from a litter, was captured in the collapse and beheaded on the spot; his head, raised on a spear (and later, tradition says, stuffed and displayed at Bijapur for years), dissolved his army where it stood.
The royal family fled south with what treasure the elephants could carry. The capital, left open, received the allied armies and every plunderer in the Deccan: the sack ran for months — palaces burned, temples defaced, the great Vitthala and Virupaksha complexes attacked with crowbar and fire, the population killed or scattered. The city was never rebuilt. A rump empire limped on from Penukonda and Chandragiri for another century — it was a late Vijayanagara ruler who granted the English the village that became Madras — but the metropolis itself returned to the boulders.
Hampi
The site today is Hampi, a World Heritage landscape of astonishing extent: the stone chariot, the musical pillars, the elephant stables, the colossal Narasimha hacked at the joints — a city-sized argument between what was built and what was done to it. The Virupaksha temple at its heart, notably, never fell silent: worship has continued there through conquest, abandonment, and archaeology alike — the one thread of the City of Victory that was never cut.